'Control' captures late singer's humanity

As lead singer for Joy Division, Ian Curtis penned some of the gloomiest songs in rock history.

He sang in a hollow, droning baritone that "love will tear us apart ... again" and "she's lost control again"; his lyrics found him wrestling with isolation, alienation and death; he named the band after a fictional Nazi concentration camp for sexual slavery; he famously hanged himself in 1980. He was 23.

While Curtis' suicide cemented him as a legend, "Control" shrewdly and simply depicts him as a man. A troubled, awkward, depressive -- and depressingly young -- man, who spent much of his youth alone in his room, smoking cigarettes while listening to David Bowie and Lou Reed.

Curtis's singing voice was authoritative -- listen to a Joy Division record, and you'll sense a large, cavalier presence in the room. But what's remarkable about "Control" is how the film captures his fragility. Sam Riley, in a comprehensive and subtly dynamic performance, plays him with relentless, grounded humanity. Few people, it seems, truly understood the inner workings of this man, but nobody seemed to suffer more in this quest than Curtis himself.

His wife, Deborah (Samantha Morton), knew him as well as anybody could -- the film is based on her 1995 memoir, "Touching from a Distance." Curtis suffered from epilepsy and, therefore, was heavily medicated. During live performances, he looks possessed and distant, his spastic dancing seemingly inspired by the seizures symptomatic of his medical condition.

As Joy Division grew in stature, Curtis disintegrated, straying toward infidelity and his subsequent inability to overcome his surprisingly infrequent self-destructive urges. But "Control" doesn't indulge in "Behind the Music" cliches and blame fame for his problems. It suggests Curtis' troubles were pre-existing, a product of extremes: his overmedicated haze often was sharply contrasted with the raw brutality of an epileptic fit.

Director Anton Corbijn is best known for photographing rock stars in stark black-and-white. His monochrome visual aesthetic is perfect for "Control," and helps downplay the monumental influence Joy Division had on modern music so we can focus on Curtis, one of rock's most tortured -- and perhaps ironically, most celebrated -- artists.